My great grandmother had a wood stove.
I have a pantry full of food, in cans, waiting to be turned into meals.
My great grandmother canned everything from peaches to green beans to pork. Only then did she ever begin to cook.
She also hauled water, built a fire, and cooked. Then she heated water on the stove and washed dishes. Cooking for her crew was about a full time job.
For me, though, cooking is not my job. It is what I have to do *after* my job. My dh, on the other hand, does his job, then comes home and waits for supper to appear. By magic. Occasionally, he does the dishes (not as often as he thinks he does) or he puts something precooked from Sam's in the oven (or microwave). He *never* cooks. He will look at my pantry full of food and ask me what there is to eat. Seriously.
So, this is my problem. My belief in equality aside, if I am ever going to consistantly have nutritous meals, I am responsible for making sure they happen.
So I flirt with organization.
I have books like Don't Panic - Dinner's in the Freezer: Great-Tasting Meals You Can Make Ahead
and the The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet: A Month of Meals Made Easy
(if your idea of Gormet is chicken and pasta, you're there) and even the Woman's Day Cookbook.
What I should probably do is to quit trying to find a system, and just start. Cook a week's worth of food. I can do that, right? I'll be off more this summer and won't be selling a house or taking six hours of PhD level classes.
2 comments:
I remember cooking for five - two kids and a big country husband who counted as two. While I never quite mastered the whole week's worth of food on a Sunday thing, I did manage to make "filler food" once a week.
On Saturdays I'd make a huge pot of something - deer chili, meatball stew, spaghetti and sausages, that sort of thing. Hearty man-food. This was what solved snacking for my husband and stepson. Otherwise, the two of them would sit down and share an entire box of cereal in mixing bowls with milk. As a snack.
I cooked three meals a day, every day, anyway. There were attempts at saving time by doing the whole cook-the-week-in-a-day thing, but all that did was turn me into a kitchen slave on the weekends. My best defense was the "filler food" and a daily crock pot.
I'm teaching Em the method. Levi may only be almost-two, but he's got that ravenous, bottomless-pit gene.
My ex's father had seven brothers. Granny Fason did the kind of wood stove cooking you're talking about here and just thinking about a day in her life takes my breath away.
That whole cooking thing is a full time job when you also take into account the planning, shopping, and remembering to defrost. I never mastered it. Never.
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